The Future of Consumerist

Over the last twelve years, Consumerist has been a steadfast proponent and voice on behalf of consumers, from exposing shady practices by secretive cable companies to pushing for action against dodgy payday lenders. Now, we’re joining forces with Consumer Reports, our parent organization, to cultivate the next generation of consumer advocacy.

Stay tuned as Consumerist’s current and future content finds its home as a part of the Consumer Reports brand. In the meantime, you can access existing Consumerist content below, and we encourage you to visit Consumer Reports to read the latest consumer news.

“I am receiving pop-up video from movieland.com that tell me I’m ‘legally obligated to pay, now that your free trial is up’ and I never ordered anything from the Website,” said Michael of Wheeling, W.V., in an October 2005 complaint to ConsumerAffairs.Com

“This video overrides all other functions on my computer until it is finished and the reminder keeps coming back every day,” he said.

The pop-up windows repeatedly admonish the user that they are violating the terms of service agreement with Movieland, and advise that they need to pay money in order to stop the pop-ups from appearing. A link is provided to offer the consumer’s credit card information.

At one point at a board meeting is a marketing executives plan to destroy one of their customer’s most expensive possessions get met with unanimous booyeahs? To be fair to Movieland, they deny the charges – which they would – and the article mentions that there seems to be some correlation between Movieland’s trial and some free screensaver that the users have downloaded, so it’s possible that this is actually some third-party scam, like those “Change your Paypal details now!” spams. But I don’t think anyone at this point is surprised that yet another corporation is acting as scummy as an anonymous Gabonese scammer somewhere.